CVE-2020-16297

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 2.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2020-08-13 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-787

Description

A buffer overflow vulnerability in FloydSteinbergDitheringC() in contrib/gdevbjca.c of Artifex Software GhostScript v9.18 to v9.50 allows a remote attacker to cause a denial of service via a crafted PDF file. This is fixed in v9.51.

Affected products

Artifex Ghostscript: from 9.18 before 9.52 — fixed in 9.52
Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 16.04, 18.04, 20.04
Debian Linux: 9.0, 10.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Artifex Ghostscript 9.52. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=701800
https://cgit.ghostscript.com/cgi-bin/cgit.cgi/ghostpdl.git/commit/?id=bf72f1a3dd5392ee8291e3b1518a0c2c5dc6ba39
https://cgit.ghostscript.com/cgi-bin/cgit.cgi/ghostpdl.git/tree/contrib/gdevbjca.c?h=ghostpdl-9.18#n659
https://git.ghostscript.com/?p=ghostpdl.git;a=commitdiff;h=bf72f1a3dd5392ee8291e3b1518a0c2c5dc6ba39
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/08/msg00032.html
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202008-20
https://usn.ubuntu.com/4469-1/
https://www.debian.org/security/2020/dsa-4748
https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=701800
https://git.ghostscript.com/?p=ghostpdl.git%3Ba=commitdiff%3Bh=bf72f1a3dd5392ee8291e3b1518a0c2c5dc6ba39
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/08/msg00032.html
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202008-20

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